Why your dog keeps jumping up (and what to do instead)

What does your dog do when someone comes to the house, or when you pass somebody on a walk?

If the answer involves two front paws leaving the floor, you are in very good company.

Over the years as a dog trainer based in Reading, Berkshire, I would say jumping up is in the top three things people contact me about, alongside support with walks and barking. Nearly everybody has it to some degree, hardly anybody books training for it, and it quietly causes more embarrassment than almost anything else I get asked about.

The muddy paws on the coat of a friend you have stopped to chat to on a walk. The relative you have to warn on the doorstep, and then talk through what to do. For my two, Poppy and Manu, it is our next door neighbour, who they absolutely adore, and who they would very much like to greet at face height.

Your dog is not being naughty

This is the bit that changes everything, so I want to be clear about it. When a dog greets another dog politely, they do not march up nose to nose. They approach on a curve, come in side on, and head for the back end. A straight frontal approach into another dog's face is rude, and quite often the start of a problem.

However, as you may have noticed, our dogs face us head on , even a sit is usually trained initially directly in front of us rather than beside us, and that all happens quite naturally.

Which tells us something, jumping up is not your dog importing dog manners. It is how they greet humans, it is a behaviour we have likely accidentally reinforced. That is an uncomfortable thing to point out, I know, but it is almost certainly us who taught them.

Think back to the puppy stage, I would bet that nearly every time they bounced up at your shins, you bent down, scooped them up, laughed and made a fuss of them. It is the most natural thing in the world for us to do, our clever puppies learn very quickly that bounding over and putting their paws on us works.

That interaction likely gets reinforced hundreds of times before anybody decides it has become a problem, usually around the point the puppy stops being small.

Whether your dog came to you as a puppy or as a rescue, jumping up has often worked brilliantly for them their whole life, because our very human responses keep paying for it.

• A smile, because they are being extremely cute.

• A hand on their chest to move them off gently.

• Trying to teach a cue like "off" or "down" once they have already jumped up, which teaches a chain rather than an alternative. Jump up, get told to get off, either way your dog gets attention

Sound familiar?

Every one of those involves touching your dog, looking at them and making a noise, at the exact moment your dog was asking for attention. For a lot of dogs, particularly the sociable, bouncy, cheerful ones, that is not a consequence at all. It is precisely the greeting they were after, even though we intended the opposite.

What to do instead

There is the good news, what works is simple, it just needs repeating.  

Stop trying to stop the jumping, and start rewarding for the alternative behaviours you want. Your dog cannot jump up and keep four paws on the floor at the same time, so making their sit or their down an absolute superpower is where the real work is.

1. Get low - If your dog does not need to jump to reach your face, quite often they will not. Crouching down, or sitting in a chair to greet them, looks like nothing at all. It simply removes the entire reason for the behaviour.

   
   

2. Scatter feed the greeting -As you come through the door, drop a small handful of food on the floor. Your dog's nose goes down, their feet stay down, and the most exciting moment of their day now happens at ground level.

   
   

3. Only give attention when the feet are down - The moment they go up, stand up and turn away, this will work for some dogs. as that pause is enough on its own, the moment their paws are back on the floor, you are back too. For other dogs, ask for that alternative behaviour, a sit or the down and reward that instead. Practise it everywhere, at home and out on walks, while there is nothing at stake, and dogs work it out far faster than most people expect.

   
   

4. Don’t forget to tell your visitors- You can do beautiful work for three weeks and undo a chunk of it with one guest who says "oh I don't mind" and ruffles your dog's ears while they are stood on their thighs. It is not rude to ask people to wait until your dog's feet are down, most of them are pleased to be told what to do.

Older Dogs who struggle to jump

For those of you with older dogs like my two, jumping up stops being just an inconvenience as dogs get older. An older dog who launches up and lands badly is putting a lot of force through joints that may already be sore or stiff.

If your dog has been jumping at you happily for eight years, that is worth thinking about now rather than after the first limp. The same goes for jumping in and out of the car, which is the version people rarely connect to the same problem. I know this one is coming for us with Manu, as we are already lifting him into my car, which sits slightly higher than my last one, and a ramp is very likely required for him in the future.

Puppies jumping up

For those of you with puppies, here is the honest bit, everybody reinforces jumping up in a puppy. It is so, so hard not to. That little bundle bouncing at your shins is completely irresistible and you would have to be made of stone not to pick them up.

That is fine. But it is worth knowing what you are building:-

• The behaviour you pay for at eight weeks is the behaviour you get at eight months.

• Nothing changes except the size of the dog and the tolerance of your visitors. If you would not want a fully grown version of it, start paying for four paws now.

• Everybody in the house has to agree to be consistent. This is the single biggest reason jumping up sticks around. One person in the household who loves it will keep it alive indefinitely, and the dog is not being difficult, they are simply playing the odds. It works sometimes, so it is worth trying every time.

• Teach them where to go, or what to do instead like bed or stair. A puppy who has learned that visitors mean go to your mat, or go to your step, or go and find the scatter, has something to do with all that excitement.

A puppy with no plan will improvise, and their improvisation involves your knees. I have been doing this long enough now to have watched some of these puppies grow up, and see how patience pays off. Tali was one of my very first clients, a Golden Retriever puppy, and that was over four years ago. Golden puppies are enthusiastic greeters, to put it politely. Four years on she greets people beautifully, big swooshy tail and four paws on the floor. None of that was luck, just wonderful consistency from her fab owners.

Making it a game rather than a chore

You know by now that this is where I always end up, because it is what I care about most. Almost everything above can be turned into a game, and the game version works far better than the telling off version. Try this one:-

Two people, one dog, stood a few metres apart. One person calls the dog and, when the feet are on the floor, pays them. Then the other person does the same. Back and forth. Your dog is running, greeting, being paid, and learning that arriving at a person with your feet down is the best thing going. It takes about four minutes and it is genuinely good fun for everybody involved. The dog does not know they are doing training. That is rather the point, and it ties straight back to my fun value, see it can be so simple.

So is it ever ok to let them jump up?

Here is where I should probably admit something. I let Poppy jump up at me recently, you might think that is a mixed message. Here is my thinking: the aim was never that a dog must never jump up at anyone, ever. It is that you decide when it is welcome and when it is not, and your dog can tell the difference as dogs learn in context, and the context mattered.

We were at the vet for her six monthly check up, Poppy is not a massive fan of the vet, despite all the work we have done over the years, so she is a little unsettled. During the appointment Megan, a new vet at Oakley Vets, who was brilliant with her and very patient, at one point Poppy came to me and jumped up to get closer, I let her. Reassuring her was the goal of placing my hand on her chest when she jumped up..

Then I asked her for something else rather than continue to reinforce jumping up, I asked her to do: a sit, a touch, a middle, which is where she comes and stands between my legs. Giving her brain a job helped her cope with being handled and examined. This only worked because she has a solid sit, touch and middle to fall back on. Without those, I would have had nothing to ask her for. Which is why Poppy can jump at me at the vet, as that has a different context than at home, and still does not get to launch at a visitor in the hallway. The exception is not the absence of training. It is what the training buys you.

Want the handout?

I have put together a one page handout on all of this, the greeting games, what to say to visitors, and how to build that sit or down into something rock solid. Jumping Up Handout

If you would rather not spend the autumn apologising for your dog's paws, this is very fixable and usually quicker than people expect. A short call is all it takes to start the conversation. No pressure, no commitment, just a chat.

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